The Art of Baking: How QAnon Folk Media Turned Crumbs into a Mass Conspiracy Culture
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Selcer, Leslie
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
QAnon’s umbrella conspiracy culture operates through a multi-scaled folk media infrastructure constituted by an array of distinct subcultures. Because QAnon offers a broad variety of online subcultures and corresponding internet communities (each with their own flavor of QAnon), this conspiracist movement has been able to attract and unite a wide variety of audiences without necessarily requiring ideological unity amongst them. In their role as lead interpreters, QAnon influencers position themselves as central nodes around which social media networks and distinct QAnon subcultures form. QAnon meaning-making occurs largely through the collaborative process of “baking”, a term which refers to a variety of do-it-yourself media strategies used to interpret, decode, and spread the esoteric messages (“crumbs”) supposedly embedded in the jumbled posts of the anonymous forum user known as “Q Clearance Patriot”. Baking combines long-standing folkloric traditions—such as the collective production of shared symbols, myths, and vernaculars—with the many formats and platforms offered by social media in order to advance QAnon narratives.
QAnon incorporates many pre-existing vernaculars and narratives from both online and offline extremist cultures. First appearing on the infamous /pol/ (“politically incorrect”) board of the anonymous internet forum 4chan, QAnon’s lore draws heavily upon tropes from right-wing internet forum cultures, as well as centuries-old white supremacist myths. QAnon claims to offer truths about widespread abuses of power, while also misdirecting critical attention away from systemic analysis of historical and material configurations of power/domination. Instead, QAnon primarily advances theories of ontological good versus evil, personified by an alleged secret war between good and evil individuals involved in grand conspiracies. QAnon calls for a “Great Awakening” to the many injustices of the world, while simultaneously undermining the idea that oppressive systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy drive many of these injustices. Thus, QAnon defends the ultra-conservative ideologies of hardcore American self-identified patriots (explicitly or implicitly constructed as white/Christian) by reacting against perceived threats of transformation to an imagined vision of the traditional great nation.
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Keywords
conspiracy theories, conspiratory folklore, digital folklore, online extremism, QAnon, vernacular web